Influencer Marketing Quotes of the Week

Thanks to the influencer marketing community for putting out so much great content for us to quote from this last week! Here we go… (Click picture for author’s Twitter page.)

“My hunch is that as the price point goes up, you’ll listen increasingly less to your tight-knit group and more to stranger-experts, people whom you don’t know personally but who’ve established themselves as knowledgeable and trustworthy around certain topics – i.e., influencers (without scare quotes). And they’ll likely be people whose job it is to review and comment on these products, like a Walt Mossberg.” – David Fine, Where Are Your Company’s Influencers? It Depends on the Price Point

“The problem is that many companies are looking at influence backwards, unknowingly or lazily relying on scores rather than understanding how influence is actually created and used.” (p. 6)

“Understanding the potential of digital influence, the question is, do these new services that capture social media scores equate to influence? The answer is no. But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful.” (p. 7)

“To be successful, brands must first define the effect they wish to realize. For example, many businesses are working with the likes of Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex to engage with consumers who possess higher scores to increase the number and reach of brand-related tweets, retweets, status updates, and blog posts. The measure here, however, is not influence or the capacity to influence, but instead visibility with the possibility of causing effect.” (p. 8) – Brian Solis, The Rise of Digital Influence

“Social influence conforms to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The more precisely you try to measure one’s influence, the more you muck up the entire system of influence. Klout and PeerIndex and similar services function through game mechanics. People who buy into the game are willing to manipulate their social media practices to get high status in these systems. But as they play the game — and as the companies respond to their gaming — those who are uninterested in the game end up getting written out of it. It evolves to be centered on the players.”

“We live in a society obsessed with measurement, but the act of measuring often means that the thing being measured becomes illusive. When sociologists measure social capital, they do so from a distance precisely because people would try to game the measurement. But what’s happening here isn’t just measurement: it’s trying to leverage measurement to do something. That’s where it loses its role as a measurement process.” – danah boyd, quoted in The Rise of Digital Influence (p. 7)

“Influencer metrics are not going away. Influence will be one piece of data we look at when trying to understand our users and customers. Now is the time to understand it and get good at it. Call out the times it’s done cheaply and poorly, but don’t take it as a sign that you can completely ignore it. Instead, be the one to get it right.” – Megan Berry, 5 Myths Around the Great Influencer Debate

“Now a mythology of social influence is rising. It’s not a “myth” in the sense something isn’t true. It’s that there’s a mythology growing about this magical dust called social influence. The magic dust exists, we can see it in action and it’s very real. It’s not clear how it works, and how we create it – even though we have growing legends of those who have succeeded.

“It’s natural that businesses want to find out how to use social influence to win in the marketplace, that’s easy enough to understand. But for all the serious effort put into understanding how to influence customers socially, the problem is staggeringly complex.” – Rohn Jay Miller, The Mythology of Social Influence

“There is a belief that mass influencers — the individuals in the middle of the influencer spectrum — are the true influencers whose aggregated opinions will steer the preferences of the masses. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t account for how this group developed its opinions and preferences in the first place.” – Peyman Nilforoush, The massive potential of word-of-mouth

“Social influence is strategic and important when dealing with brand advocates and other marketing alliances. I won’t argue that, in fact I encourage this. But what about your customers? Sure, most of your brand advocates ARE customers…but have we thought about the customers who aren’t advocates and have no influence whatsoever according to Klout or any other combination of metrics?” – Gerry Praysman, Should Social Influence Matter?

Did you come across a great quote recently that you think we should feature here? Email us with the link and selected quote!